Sunday, 9 February 2014

PrestaShop is one of the most popular online shopping cart scripts. Its community is very strong and it features many functionality improving plugins.

Review: Choose PrestaShop for online store but why?

Decent efficiency, good functionalities list and rather simple modification make it one of the best scripts for programmers. You can view and download the script at www.PrestaShop.com

Advantages

Administration
When compared to systems like Magento, PrestaShop's administration panel is quite intuitive and easy to master. It's especially important for those who are just starting their Internet adventure.

Community
There's a large group of users contributing to a good support system in discussion boards and the like.

Installation and modification
The script is based on a popular template system called "Smarty". It's well known to many designers and programmers what will make graphics modifications easy for them. If you're not the programmer type you'll easily find one to do whatever you need to be done for you.

Functionalities
There are many functionalities built in PrestaShop. Many of them are no match for Magento, but in most cases they are sufficient for beginners and intermediate online shop owners. Many of the functionalities you would miss can be installed, they often are free. If you still can't find what you need, you can surely find a programmer who knows the system to add options you require.

Efficiency
PrestaShop is quite efficient and does not put high demands on server resources, especially when considering how much it has to offer. A built-in page indexation system is an advantage. It's not as efficient as Quick.Cart but works definitely faster than Magento. The script's efficiency to offered functionalities ratio is quite good.

DisadvantagesLarge number of bug fixes
The script programmers release bug fixes and new options about twice a month. An update is requires especially when it comes to security issues. Unfortunately applying those fixes takes a considerable know-how. Releasing bug fixes makes it known to everybody what kind of vulnerabilites there are in older versions, so someone could use it on an older scripts. On the other hand frequent fix releases are a pain for the shop owners. This vicious circle could only be broken by automatic updates, which, as of yet, are not available in PrestaShop.Paid functionalities
Built-in functionalities in other free scripts can often turn out to be payable in PrestaShop. That's why it's worth considering if the paid functionality you're after is really that necessary. If so, maybe another script could offer it for free?

Scalibility
Though the application aspires as a large shop base, it does not do as well as Magento. The script architecture can at some point hinder or even completely prevent a programmer from further developing the cart.

Conclusions

PrestaShop is good for start. The script works as well with medium and large number of products. If there are few products and a lot of traffic, other scripts like Quick.Cart would work better. PrestaShop's efficiency when there's a 100 products isn't any better than when there are 1000.
As we all know, the appetite grows with what it feeds on, but what PrestaShop lacks in built-in functionalities, can be made up with free or paid plugins. It's rare that an online shop owner is hang out to dry, since the PrestaShop programmers' community is ever growing.